


Flash in the Can

by Sholio



Category: Dark Tower - Stephen King
Genre: Bonding, Families of Choice, Gen, Post-Apocalypse, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-17
Updated: 2020-04-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:40:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23693284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: The ka-tet finds a stash of unlabeled crates in a bunker.
Relationships: Jake Chambers & Eddie Dean & Susannah Dean & Roland Deschain
Comments: 11
Kudos: 26
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	Flash in the Can

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Edonohana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edonohana/gifts).



> Many thanks to my beta, Scioscribe, for your helpful comments and canon-check!

They found the bunker after three days of walking across salt flats. Once, it was probably a lake bottom, according to Roland. Now it was a seemingly endless field of cracked salt pans. From a distance it looked flat enough for Susannah's chair to roll easily, but up close it was crisscrossed with cracks, forcing Roland and Eddie to take turns helping her for mile upon aching, backbreaking, bone-jolting mile.

They passed ancient stiltlike structures of wood and metal, towering above the flats on drunkenly tilted legs that were heavily crusted with thick coatings of salt crystals. Eddie and Susannah passed the time by speculating on what they were for -- fishing platforms, supports for long-vanished roads or train tracks, long-dead war machines ...

"Maybe it's art," Eddie said.

"Could be religious."

"Could be the scaffolding for the Grand High Poobah of Blatt and we'd never know," Eddie said, and laughed.

It wasn't that funny, but there really wasn't much to laugh about after three days of traveling through the salt-encrusted wasteland. Their water was running low, and they were down to repetitive rations of bread and jerky. Susannah's lips always tasted of salt. There was salt on everything, skin and clothes and tools. Roland had them oil the guns morning and evening to preserve them. Their hands cracked and bled.

The only mercy was that it wasn't particularly hot. In fact, there was something eerie about the coolness of the thin white sunlight beating down from above, as if the heat had been leached out of it somehow. This was the kind of place that made Susannah think about some of the things Roland said about worlds dying and time winding down like a watch spring.

But finally, finally the land began tilting upward again. Despite their exhaustion, and the increased struggle of the climb, it was a relief to finally have some hope of getting out of this place.

The bunker was nestled among these foothills that might once have been a shore. Susannah's first thought was that it was eerily contemporary-looking, neither futuristic nor old: a squat concrete structure that might easily have been built just a few years ago, except for the clear age of the salt-crusted, cracked cinderblock walls. 

"Man," Eddie said, as they approached cautiously, guns in hand, fanned out in the defensive phalanx, with Jake and Oy in the back, that they fell into automatically these days. "This looks like a supervillain lair."

"I was thinking a bomb shelter," Susannah said.

"Oh yeah, survivalist bunker. I knew it reminded me of something. Maybe there's food."

The door was cracked open a few inches, revealing a slice of a dark interior. "This was sealed until recently," Roland murmured, fingering the seal. He pushed it open with his foot, gun at the ready. There was a drift of sand across the sill, but the interior was relievingly salt-free, bandit-free, and monster-free. The floor was concrete, and there was a stack of wooden crates against the back wall.

"See?" Eddie said, pointing. "See? Survivalist bunker!"

Roland used his knife to crack the seal on the top crate. It was full of silvery pouches, up to the top. To Susannah's eyes, each was about the size of a hardcover book.

Eddie started to reach for one. Roland touched his hand to stop him, and tapped the pouch lightly with the back of his knife, then cautiously picked it up.

"Oy?" Oy commented querulously, standing on his hind legs to swipe at it with the tip of his long tongue.

"If this is a bunker, then these have got to be some kind of MREs." Eddie picked up another one and handed it to Susannah. It was cool and heavy in her hand, and gently yielding. There were no markings on the package, just the featureless silver. 

"What are MREs?" she asked.

"You know, like military rations?"

"C-rations?" she said.

"Uh, yeah. Sure. Those."

"Don't squeeze it," Roland said, and Susannah guiltily and automatically opened her hand, and then had to juggle it for a moment to keep hold of it. "There are weapons like this," he went on. "Squeezing mixes the contents."

Eddie froze with another in his hand. "And then what?"

"It explodes," Roland said, his gaze distant.

Jake, who had just reached for another one, pulled his hands back and took a step away. Eddie very carefully put his back, then reached a wordless hand for Susannah's and replaced that as well.

"Thanks for _telling_ us, man," Eddie said.

"Or it could be food, as you said," Roland said, and Eddie threw his hands up in the air.

"Can we cut one open and find out?" Susannah asked.

"If you cut it open, it explodes."

"So how _do_ we find out?" Jake said.

*

"This is such a Roland plan," Eddie remarked. "No offense."

Roland didn't bother answering that. In the gathering dusk, they were crouched behind a pile of rocks. About a hundred yards away, the silver pouch perched atop a boulder, gleaming faintly pink in the lingering sunset light. Roland steadied his gun hand on top of their makeshift barricade.

"I suggest you all duck down and cover your ears."

"Ears!" Oy said. Jake pulled Oy into his lap and covered the billy-bumbler's long ears while Oy licked his face. Eddie sighed and put his bigger hands over Jake's ears instead of his own.

"So just to be clear," Susannah said, "how big a boom are we expecting, if that's one of those exploding ones?"

"We should be out of the blast radius here," Roland said. He spoke with the absent tone that meant he was doing calculations in his head.

"Should be?" Eddie began, and then Roland fired.

There was no explosion. Four heads, one with long ears, popped up over the barricade. The silver pouch had slumped and was leaking something dark down the side of the boulder.

"Safe to approach?" Susannah asked quietly.

Roland stood up and holstered his gun. "Yes," he said. "I think it's stew."

*

It was indeed, a dark stew with chunks of unidentifiable meat and a rich, spicy scent, oozing out of the thumb-sized bullet hole. Oy immediately tried to lap at it. Eddie pulled him away, only to have Roland step up, put a finger in it, and cautiously lick it.

"Oh, come _on!_ That can't possibly be safe. This place is like a zillion years old."

Roland looked around, at the rest of his ka-tet staring at him as if they expected _him_ to explode. "It doesn't smell or taste spoiled."

"Oy wants to eat it," Jake said. "That means it's probably good, right?"

"I don't know about the rest of you," Susannah said, prodding Eddie's arm, "but I'm willing to risk it just to eat something other than jerky tonight."

Back at the bunker, tired as they were, they dismantled the stack of crates and opened all of them to see what was in each one. Most of them contained silvery stew packets, but there were also a couple with jugs of water, slightly plastic-smelling but apparently untainted. It was a vast relief to be able to wash; they didn't take full baths, but were at least able to wash their hands and faces, sluicing away the collected salt and grime.

There was enough dry brush, salt-encrusted though it was, to make a fire for the first time in days. Susannah collected a handful of stew packets and rolled out to join the others gathered around the cheerful orange and gold flames.

"Dinner is served," she said, handing them around. 

"At least we have plenty of salt," Eddie remarked, turning a pouch over in his hand. "So how are you supposed to open these things, other than the Roland method?"

This was something that Roland didn't seem to have an answer to. Susannah was the one who found it on hers, a little tab near the top. When she pulled on it, it peeled away in a neat strip, opening the top of the packet.

The smell that rose up, however, was nothing like the dark, spicy stew scent from earlier. Instead it was light, floral, and sweet.

"What's this?" Susannah asked. She dipped a finger, as Roland had done, and cautiously touched her tongue-tip to it. It was very sweet, like very floral honey, with a syrupy texture.

"Wait, they're different?" Eddie leaned over to investigate and sampled it too. Oy unrolled a long tongue to swipe at Eddie's hand, and then sneezed.

"You know, I'm honestly not sure if this is dessert or perfume," Susannah said. "Think they're all different?"

"One way to find out, I guess." Eddie started to open another one, then handed it to Jake. "Here, kid, you do the honors."

Jake peeled back the tab. This was definitely not stew, but it wasn't strong-smelling; there was a faint scent like grass clippings. Jake squeezed out a little thick green goo into his palm, and made a face. "Ugh. Vegetables."

"Like spinach or something?" Eddie asked, making a face similar to Jake's. Susannah smacked him lightly in the back of the head.

"We need that," Roland said, leaning forward to see. "To avoid the traveler's disease."

Eddie reached for another of the unidentified pouches, then hesitated. "Is there any chance some of these are going to explode, do you think?"

Roland shook his head. "I doubt if they'd store their weapons and their food together. To be safe, we'll take them all from the same crate, the one already tested."

No one had a problem with that. The words "blast radius" hung unspoken in the air.

*

It turned into a game, after that. With a lot of giggling and guessing, they opened packets and sorted them into the general categories of "definitely food," "possibly food," and "other."

Roland didn't participate -- he sat by the fire oiling his guns, while the rest of them opened packets like presents -- but he also didn't complain about the waste, as Susannah was half expecting him to. It was clear, she supposed, that there was far more here than they could possibly carry with them, and also not much point in carrying mystery packets around unless they absolutely had to, since only a small proportion of them had contents that were definitely some kind of identifiable food.

And sometimes she noticed Roland smiling as he listened to them, sharing quietly in their delight from the edge of their little circle.

Eventually they got tired of it and settled down to cautiously sampling their finds. Even seasoned with the slight nervousness of eating food that might be older than any of them, it was a better meal than they'd had in months -- spiced stew, fruit in syrup, something very like potatoes au gratin, something else that could almost be macaroni and cheese if the pasta was disc-shaped instead of tubular.

"You know what would help with this?" Eddie remarked, his tone wry. "Labels. Hasn't anyone around these parts ever heard of writing what's inside on the outside?"

"Could be they were labeled with something that degraded over time, sugar," Susannah suggested. "Like paint or something."

"Maybe they couldn't read?" Jake suggested. "Maybe they forgot how. Maybe they were just kinda dumb."

"Umm!" Oy agreed, and from the far side of the fire, unexpected as always, Roland laughed his creaky, unpracticed laugh.


End file.
